We bury pulleys in our walls and we swing things heavy from them–come here and pull me down. Tug lower the concrete drapes I tack up to digest the light in even tones. It never works, the keeping out–light has a way of making oceans out of the slightest crack in granite. We are not, we are, and not again. A thousand things. I said to someone: befriend those that give, but ones that can also take. You need both. You need to hear it, you need to say it. The people that are all one or the other, be wary. Let them warn themselves. You need lighthouses. You need music. You need to be triggered to go, and to come, and to say the things you think nobody wants to hear. Somebody will. Even if that somebody is just you with too much time and one uncomfortable silence to cradle your sentence, appropriate in its bad timing. Cherish that ill clock, make it tick double for you.
There are things that words will never reach but I try and I try still–I try everything. I take the road under the going-fast car, I take that blur and I adhere it to your fellowship knuckles. I consider the way they held past lovers, favorite books, and doors open for strangers. I take the drums to Pela and I wrap them around your ‘97 summer like it is the last thing I will ever do. Like it is the most important, the vital. I take your unseen verses and I fling them out into oblivion so anyone with a meandering stride on the long walk home can read them. I take my last time in a church and I hand it to you. I mouthed all of the hymns because I was too shy and disbelieving to sing them. The last drink I pour out, the one that made our year a waste, the one that sent a mutual to the bathroom spiraling in heartache. The parts of you that hide–I take them and trade you; here are mine absolute. I’m afraid of never saying it. I’m afraid of actually obtaining what I chase because sometimes craving belief is enough. Is it possible to still hold faith when you have what you are aching for?
I’m afraid of leaving this world without ever really understanding my own force as a person. Maybe it isn’t important but it is all that I have and it is all that I can really offer. I stand behind microphones because I can’t whisper loud enough, can’t nudge audible. As much as it hurts and for all the mistakes made, I adore it. I’d be a fool to think less, or to waste the minutes I have dwelling on what could’ve been different, or what could’ve been changed. Sometimes I miss the way I moved and talked when I did not know so much, when existence meant consumption first. When I could kick away at a show and lose myself completely, without thought or stilled feet. When I could close my eyes and lean my head back with the yelling of the lead singing and understand that ultimate release. That nothing, and I mean nothing, will ever be this way again. This instant, this indecisiveness, this precipice. An episode may echo in my head a long time after the occurring but I am a fool to think it can be repeated, that I could wait this way again leaning on a wall so angry and lost–that somewhere the twenty-three year old me isn’t somewhere spitting and kicking. But you did not lose! The light simply switches; this is not lost. If our commons are products of differences, lifetimes in still frame–when the hands shake touching this, and the neck beneath us we lean in to kiss and it isn’t ours to begin with. It isn’t ours. Even the things we promise and cannot stick to they are important. Our misgivings have a way of revealing what we think no one can see. And it is decades gone from us–it’s walking into the place you left long ago and smelling the same damn smells and realizing what’s locked into us is in for good and to disregard this would be stealing the moon: impossible, too big for our pockets.
Life is a hearing and we shout it out with the radio; we beat the steering wheel with a knotted hand. We understand that everything is precisely all that we have to give. Nothing less I tell you. Nothing less.
